Thursday, 5 January 2012

The Fundamentals of Animation Notes

These are my general notes following the Fundamentals of Animation Introductory lecture;

- Make observations of how people walk, talk, move, write etc. to help you plan your animation well. Once the bare bones of an animation are there, your instinct of what looks 'right' fills in the rest. To help with this you can film you and friends acting out your desired animation and studying it to pick up on natural motion.

- No matter how fictional your character is, their animation needs to be grounded in reality. For example a centaur is a blend of real horse movement and real human movement otherwise the audience finds it unbelievable and boring.

- Animation is about good scripting and illusion. If a viewer begins to feel like the characters they are watching have personalities, and they want to know more, you have succeeded. This point can be seen clearly in the first Pixar short featuring two lamps playing with a ball. (include reference to from pencil to pixel DVD here)

- Explore the human form, and it's shape from all postures poses and angle through exploratory life drawings and be sure to include these with your submission.

- Ensure you use your blog as a form of a Reflective Journal. This means you need to document research and ideas, and then push them, analyse them and comment on what you plan to take forward and what you have decided is irrelevant to your project.

- Use screenshots in stages of your work, even playful work, to show how your models progressed and comment on how you changed ideas or learnt new skills along the way in the form of a timeline.

- Be exploratory in your experiments on maya and mudbox, but make sure that your final submitted piece of animation shows finesse and professionalism the experiments are for the blog, not the submission.

- Timecode Format; hours:minutes:seconds:frames (hh:mm:ss:ff)

- Animation can be described as 'Sequential images in motion' which I think is a rather handy succinct way of thinking about it.

- In animation, as opposed to film, you don't have to work in linear. You can make frames out of sequence and indeed edit them too.

- Film = 24fps
- Game = 30-60fps
- PAL = 25fps (UK TV speed)
- NTSC = 29.97fps (USA TV speed)
- Eyesight = 60fps then it becomes a blur.

Below are research objectives and general notes for myself.

Research :

- The Illusion of Life by Thomas and Johnston (Diseny)

- Persistance of Vision vs. Phi-phenomenon and Beta Movement.

- The making of the corpse bride

- Phill Tippet - "Go Motion" and Peter Nichols film 'dragon slayer'?

- Look at the making of the game Limo for their blend of 2D and 3D animation.

- Look up the term on-model and off-model and consistency in animation. Original Simpson episodes highlight this well. Look at what model sheets are, how they are used and consider making one for your own character.





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Robin Silcock

I am a Second Year Games Art and Design student at Norwich University of the Arts. After exploration of a number of roles in my first year, I am now looking to graduate as a 3D Artist with applicable skills in Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush and Photoshop. I understand that my skills in this field are not there yet - but I aim to achieve this goal through consistently working through the programs in my University and Personal Projects. I love to be busy - I have always had a lot of things on my plate since the age of 7 where I successfully balanced school with Ballet, Tap, Horse-Riding, French, Piano and Singing Lessons! In the same fashion, my university schedule is just as hectic and varied; I am a Peer Mentor to first year students, Student Rep for Second Year, and President of the Enterprise Society. Like I said, I love to be busy! I am a Games Hippie - so to speak - I believe that Games if designed and harnessed in the right way, will be able to help solve many of the global issues we have today - even if it starts off in a small way. Just look at the positive effects that Facebook and Twitter have already had... When navigating my blog;
  • Works in Progress - This section is a constantly running account of all my current projects - personal and for university. It will contain reference images and website links and sometimes less than coherent posts, so be prepared!
  • Finished Pieces - This is where you will find my more polished artwork. Looking for help with Maya? Check out the posts tagged "Maya How-To's"